Carl sternheim biography

Carl Sternheim

German playwright and short story writer

Carl Sternheim

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner portrait of Carl Sternheim 1916

BornWilliam Adolph Carl Francke
(1878-04-01)1 April 1878
Leipzig, Germany
Died3 November 1942(1942-11-03) (aged 64)
Ixelles, Belgium
Resting placeIxelles Cemetery
OccupationPlaywright and writer
PeriodWilhelmine
GenreShort stories
SubjectMoral sensibilities of the emerging German middle class
Literary movementExpressionism
SpouseEugenie Hauth

Carl Sternheim (born William Adolph Carl Francke; 1 April 1878 – 3 November 1942) was a German playwright and short story writer. One of the major exponents of German Expressionism, he especially satirized the moral sensibilities of the emerging German middle class during the Wilhelmine period.

Early life and education

Sternheim was born in Leipzig, the son of Rosa Marie Flora (née Francke) (1856–1908) and Carl Julius Sternheim (1852–1918), a banker.[1][2] His parents married two years after he was born.[3] H

Sternheim, Carl

STERNHEIM, CARL (1878–1942), German playwright. The son of a banker, Sternheim was born in Leipzig and, after university studies, lived in several German cities. His early writing showed little originality, bearing the imprint of Hauptmann, Wedekind, Wagner, Nietzsche, and George. His creative breakthrough occurred in Die Hose (1911), the first in a series of witty and abusively anti-bourgeois comedies, later grouped together in the cycle Aus dem buergerlichen Heldenleben with plays such as Buerger Schippel (1913) and Der Snob (1914). Sternheim admired the feudal aristocracy but showed a distaste for the upper middle class. In attacking the bourgeoisie he was attacking the bourgeois in himself, just as his often vitriolic antisemitic outbursts were a form of self-abuse, as in his essays Berlin oder Juste Milieu (1920) and Tasso oder Die Kunst des Juste Milieu (1921). Sternheim thus unwittingly played into the hands of Hitler. His comedies are nevertheless remarkable for their immaculate construction and for the terseness of their diction. In his sho

Sternheim, Carl

Carl Sternheim is best known for his series of comedies, subsequently grouped together under the generic title “Aus dem bürgerlichen Heldenleben” [“From the heroic life of the bourgeoisie”]. Sternheim's unique brand of comedy, which achieved notable success in the years immediately before World War I, raised in the audience the expectation that the central character was to be ridiculed. In the event, however, that the central comic figure triumphs, the audience's cultural and social expectations are confounded. The author's literary strategy, and the stylised language in which he wrote, made considerable demands on his audience. Sternheim's texts have been interpreted in mutually contradictory ways: some critics read his work as a series of satirical attacks on bourgeois values;…

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